You must not work in IT. Large companies and organizations need high capacity offline storage like this to move data to external facilities for disaster recovery. When you need to build up a new data center for recovery or even just initially seeding it, tapes like this make that possible. And what about places like CERN who share their huge amounts of data from the Large Hadron Collider with other labs and research groups? A single run of the ATLAS or CMS experiments produces massive amounts of data that other labs validate and analyze. Again, tapes like this can transfer data physically faster than any network connection. Just because you don't need a tape system like this at home doesn't mean business doesn't have needs for it. Fujifilm wouldn't have put money into developing this new tape system if there wasn't a need for it. There is definitely a need for it.
Are data centers sending physical copies of their data to different storage facilities by overnight mail?
I have worked at a few companies where this was done. It was generally done for two purposes: 1. offsite archival storage and 2. a failsafe for disaster recovery. We also sent physical copies of data to other locations or partner companies when it would take longer than a day to do a transfer over the internet. It would take longer than a day to move many TB of data over the wire so FedEx has higher bandwidth delivery. It makes sense when you can't be messing around with slow and unreliable internet transfers.
Ok, I guess in certain situations where the data doesn't change often but needs to be archived I can see why it would be done.
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